Archeage beta impression

A new post has been done with my second impressions which are better. I left this post here as some of the issues rased are still vaild.

http://www.yamama.co.nz/2014/08/archeage-second-impressions.html 

I finally got a invite to the Archeage beta after so many emails of them saying " Hey buy this, play the beta this weekend  "

I am glad I didn't fork over any money. I was quite hyped about the game but in the back of my mind I knew it was going to live up to expectations
 Techinal Issues:

When I first launched the game a thing called Hackshield pro appeared, then my HDD locked as my antivirus wanted to scan the entire 22gb game.pak file. After 20 mins it was still going so I killed the process and added a exception to the AV to skip that file.

Hackshield pro worries me, I do not like 3rd party systems being invited on my PC. I am researching into if this is just a process that runs while the game launches or if they have infected my PC with drivers.

While I hate cheaters, I also hate company's that scan my machine without my permission. If its like Punkbusters, BattleEye, VAC or Blilzzard Warden I don't care. Those only run with the program.

The reason I am concerned is the game required admin to run.

Character creation:

I picked the cat race but wow, are the female terrible. They don't even seem like they are part of the same race.

The options were detailed, you had sliders but I struggled to make anything descend. Its not as good as Aion. The cats all seem to have variations of dreadlocks for hair.

Graphics:

Cryengine 3 but looks like a MMO from the late 1990's. The cat starting zone is a windswept high altitude valley with nothing but cliff walls and shrubs.

Animations are stiff and have Asian quirkiness to them.

The Human starting area is better, with trees and water but there is something wrong with shadows and places you seems to be chases by a dynamic shadow ring as if the baked shadows don't match the current light.

Audio:

Generic
Also quite annoying with music playing each time you hand in a quest.

Community:
This is the worst mmo I have ever seen for a community. The vile racist hate speech in all chat channels and no way to report. It made barrens chat look good.

No one interacts with each other, they just spit out crap 24/7.

As this is also a openworld pvp game you can expect to have the same gutter level of player you would find in EvE Online.

Trion worlds seems to be just ignoring it.

Quest System:

Terrible. No quest objectives are shared, game funnels you into a place where everyone is after the 1 mob that re spawns every 60 seconds. As the game breeds the kind of community mentioned above no one wants to party up. Selfish play from the start.

The Human area doesn't seem to have this bottleneck but it still feels over crowed with people racing you to mobs to tag them before you can. This creates bad behaviour and mmos should follow what Guildwars 2 does. Everything you see is yours and helping people kill mobs takes nothing away from the rewards.

Controls:

No way to flip mouse Y axis. This is 2014 and this feature was in Duke3D from 1996. You may not find this important but try this. Go into you fav game, now tick invert mouse. Then try and play. This is what the game is like to me if it doesn't have this option. For the record I haven't played a game which I haven't been able to invert the mouse .......

Way too many name plates, you can turn them off in the controls but by default everything is on, including your name.

Note - I'll be updating this as I play the beta weekend.